Sometimes when the old woman Slow gets to telling Pretty a story she just laughs and laughs and then Pretty laughs and laughs and off they go on a tangent.  Well Amigos, this week we heard one of those tangents right here in the living room at Casa de Canterbury and The Red Man thought Sweet Jesus those two lesbians are easily entertained.  Slow went to get her hair cut in the afternoon of the first day we were back –  before she even unpacked her clothes.  That night when Pretty came home from working at the Mast General Store downtown the old woman told Pretty about her experience.

Slow goes to one of those Quick Clips places that charge senior citizens $9 for a quick clip and evidently the turnover in hairdressers is high when the prices are low.  At any rate she has a different person every time she goes.  The Quick Clipper this particular day was a young attractive girl named Cassandra.  Of course Slow tries to get to know every stranger in the whole world and started asking the young woman twenty questions about herself.  The Quick Clipper wasn’t too chatty at first.

Turns out Cassandra is from Red Bank which is a little town in Lexington County that is famous for being the possible home of The Red Man himself but that is simply coincidental and irrelevant to the story.

During the course of their one-sided conversation while the girl was Quick Clipping Slow’s hair, Slow tells her that her granddaddy was a barber in his own one-chair shop in a little town in  Texas for sixty-five years.  She tells every person who cuts her hair that same story, as if they care.

At this point the young woman found common ground and began to warm to the talking and told Slow about her own grandmother who was married to a Baptist preacher –  but was also a part-time hair stylist.  As a matter of fact, her grandmother used to style the wigs for a number of women in their congregation.  The women would bring the wigs to her grandmother at prayer meeting on Wednesday night and her grandmother brought them back with her to church every Sunday morning.  It was a win-win arrangement for the preacher’s wife and the ladies who looked to her for more than spiritual guidance.

Somehow the conversation drifted to the distance the young woman drove every day from Red Bank to Columbia which was a good thirty miles one way.  Oh the young woman said, my mother drives me because I don’t drive.  How old are you? Slow asked and the girl said 21 years old and Slow said Well why don’t you drive? to which Cassandra said I don’t have a license.  What? No license?  Why?

I failed the test she said, I’ve tried several times but I can’t pass.

Well, Slow and Pretty started laughing hysterically at this point in the story because they both remembered the Will and Grace episode with the young woman who is a nurse in a hospital and she tells Grace and Will she can’t drive because she failed the driver’s test and she keeps taking the test over and over again.   It’s so hard.  They’ve used that phrase forever as an inside joke and now Slow found it in real life sitting in a Quick Clips salon.

Cassandra said her older sister was 23 when she got her license so she didn’t feel too bad and really it was probably something in their family since her great-grandmother never drove a day in her life.  Nope.  Seems like we’re all skittish of the road, she continued.  Well do you have a boyfriend? Slow asked and the young woman said Oh, yes she had a boyfriend who was 19 years old but he don’t drive either because his mama never let him practice with their car.  Her boyfriend climbed cell towers in Apex, North Carolina and his boss drove him to and from work.

So Sports Fans I’ll leave you with the image of the old woman Slow and Pretty laughing about the Will and Grace episode and Cassandra not too worried about driving for a few more years herself but who wouldn’t mind if her boyfriend got his license and The Red Man thinking you can’t make this shit up.

I need to get my spot reserved on the king-sized bed here at Casa de Canterbury – space is at a premium, if you catch my drift.

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The Red Man and Tennis Ball Obsessed Chelsea

who seems to require a little more room these days

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